Ask.com is dead
Last week, IAC quietly discontinued Ask.com. For most of us in the industry, the actual surprise wasn't the closure, but the revelation that the platform we originally knew as Ask Jeeves had survived this long. It spent its final 16 years operating as a hollowed-out Q&A site, having surrendered its own search crawler way back in 2010.
So Ask.com didn't really die last week. It died slowly, in public, over more than a decade. What's strange is the timing: IAC pulled the plug on the original "ask the internet a question" product in the same quarter that every major tech company is spending billions trying to rebuild exactly that.
Written by
John Rambrandt
I’m a computer engineer who spends my time building for the Web and contributing to open source, but I’ve always been obsessed with how things break. I treat cybersecurity as a puzzle that involves both code and people, blending technical defense with a deep dive into the psychology of social engineering. My goal is simple: build tools that are open, scalable, and actually resilient against real-world threats.
